Colony Creators Queue up What's to Come in Season 2

Carlton Cuse and Ryan Condal tease what's to come.

Will Bowman (Josh Holloway) got what he wanted -- a chance to rescue his son -- by the Season 1 finale of Colony, but his family was destroyed in the process. With his wife Katie (Sarah Wayne Callies) now a known Resistance collaborator and his son Bram (Alex Neustaedter) captured after illegally trying to leave the Los Angeles colony, this family isn't in a good place going into Season 2.

Showrunners Carlton Cuse and Ryan Condal are already hard at work writing the second season of the USA sci-fi drama, and the duo got on the phone to talk about the events of the finale and the gameplan for what's coming up next in Season 2. While the Bowmans will remain front and center on the show, expect to see the world of Colony expand a lot more when it returns.

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IGN: How did you come up with the design for what the alien would be, and how did you two decide how much to show and in what way to show it?

Ryan Condal: We always wanted to show something. Carlton and I always joked, "Oh yeah, we're going to give you an alien in the first season, but when you see it it's going to be dead." That was our "we'll give you what you want but not really what you want." The idea was the reason you don't see them and part of the mythology of their presence and their occupation is they wear these environmental suits because they can't survive in our environment. It's in a spacesuit because, for whatever reason, this is a toxic environment to the creature. That is a reveal, and that's part of what you're seeing in episode 9 and then episode 10.

Our concept all the way along is the alien should be a humanoid because it should look sort of like us and be a bipedal, two-arms/two-legs creature, because that's the thing we're going to relate to more. Looking into the future, looking into humanity seen through the prism of science fiction, it's just a much more relatable thing to be faced with this superior being, superior intellect, more advanced race that kind of looks like us.

Carlton Cuse: Of course, we'll realize eventually that there are even more advanced grasshoppers that are in power over our aliens, but that's Season 13. [laughs]

IGN: You spent a lot of time this season exploring how humanity is affected by this alien occupation. Is that what you would want to continue to explore in Season 2, or would you want to expand upon the implications of how these aliens differ from us?

Cuse: There's a little bit of science fiction. Science fiction is really the backdrop, but really we're interested in telling a human story about what it's like to live under occupation and colonization. The human stories are really the focus, and that's why we only showed an alien one time this whole season. That was what felt fresh and exciting about the idea was doing the modern analog for things like Paris under Nazi occupation or Iraq or Afghanistan and what it's like when a country is occupied by a superior force and a proxy government is running things. Those were the stories that really interested Ryan and me.

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We tend to really keep the focus on the personal story, but that said, there's going to be lots of action in the second season. There are spaceships and some science fiction technology in there, and there's some interesting reveals. You're going to learn a lot more about the state of the world and why these aliens are here and what's going on, but it's all going to be against the backdrop of a very personal story.

IGN: The Resistance got their first good sample of alien biology and technology in the finale. Will gaining that knowledge have any impact on our main characters and the main Resistance storyline, or was that just something to explain to us as the viewer what we're seeing?

Condal: Part of it was the story of futility of trying to understand this massively advanced race and technology with basically rudimentary tools, as we see them with their saws and hammers trying to break into the suit. But then they have this little victory at the end when they get this little piece off the being before they turn it back over to the Occupation, and we see that as playing a role in the story next season as far as the Resistance.

IGN: We see the Bowmans really divided by the end of Season 1. Where do you see that family and that storyline going forward?

Cuse: I think that ultimately this show is about whether this family is going to survive this occupation. We hope the audience cares about our family getting back together and being together, because we certainly do as creators. We really wanted to illustrate the cost and consequences of the lack of trust in the marriage. They weren't being honest with each other, and that comes home to roost and at the end of the season they're in a bad place. The question for Season 2 is can they put their relationship and their family back together and what will that look like.

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IGN: Like we got our first look at an alien in the finale, it's also the first time we meet Charlie. What should we read into what he's been up to in the Santa Monica block with this mysterious Solomon?

Condal: We always wanted to show proof of life on Charlie this year. We thought it would be pulling the rug out from under the audience to have something happen where Charlie wasn't alive or wasn't in Santa Monica. It was such a crucial part of Will's mission that it would seem like a completely pointless and futile world if Charlie wasn't actually there where he thought and alive. We did want to show proof of life this year, but we did it in a way that suggests more story to come. We definitely see that playing out next season.

I will say that Carlton and I, when we were standing on set for the pilot -- which seems like eons ago -- our most expensive set in the exclusion zone between Santa Monica and Los Angeles, the place where the truck bomb goes off, and it came to us. We were looking at the set and realized it was the perfect bookend to the first season. Will is trying to go get his son back through these underground, illegitimate means. ... At the very end of the season, the bookend to that moment is him driving through basically the same wall but in an official capacity in his care with his badge to go get his son back, to show that even if he did collaborate with the Nazis he did win this personal victory at the end.

IGN: It sounds like you two have a pretty good idea of what you're doing in Season 2. What is your writing process when you are developing this show? Did you have a good idea of where you wanted to go in Season 2 back in Season 1? Or do you figure it out as you go along episode to episode?

Cuse: Between the pilot and when the series got ordered, Ryan and I spent a lot of time talking about the show in general and came up with our overarching plan, that was more like four or five seasons of the show and generally how things will unfold. Then, after we finished the writing of Season 1, Ryan and I spent a lot of time talking about what the arc of Season 2 would be and deciding the shape for what we want to accomplish in the second season of the show. Then we were fortunate enough to get an early renewal and get writers hired and start actually working on Season 2. Ryan, much more so than me, has been in the room with the writers, taking that plan and expanding it out into specific episodes. We're really just in the process now.

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IGN: Since it sounds like you've already figured it out, what is the larger threat on the show, with the Hosts and the Occupation, when we pick up in Season 2?

Condal: We always wanted to tell a story where we're establishing a world and a set of characters, but beyond that we didn't want there to be stasis on the show. We want each season to standalone as its own story. We hope everyone really liked the first season, but we hope the people who see it and follow it all the way to the end see that, regardless of what you thought about it and where you think the story is headed, you understand that necessarily the story has to be different in the second season. Will is leaving the block, he's going into find Charlie. Katie has, in theory, been exposed by the Occupation and is known to be a Resistance fighter. Snyder is out of a job.

So we understand that the dynamics of Season 1 where Will is in the Occupation, Katie is in the Resistance, Katie is lying to Will, Will doesn't know -- all of those dynamics have kind of been explored out, so there's a new dynamic now. We've scattered our characters and they all have points of views into different corners of the world, and we want to use that to explore out the larger world of Colony. In terms of where Season 2 is going, Colony and I have always been really fascinated by this idea that, in extreme situations like this, both political sides of the equation -- occupation and resistance -- always shift toward the extremes.

Snyder's method of the "soft hand" did not work, so they need to install a more authoritarian form of government in order to maintain control, and in response, the Resistance -- which doesn't necessarily mean Broussard, because there were other Resistance cells in Los Angeles -- tends toward the extreme as well. Just as ISIS was a result of the failure and continued persecution of al-Qaeda by Western democracy, you're going to see a much scarier form of fanatical resistance in Los Angeles. It's a new story about the extremes of things, and the Los Angeles that Snyder created for everybody was sort of the best version of this kind of occupation.

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Cuse: Obviously, we even see this in our current political campaign for president. If you're extreme, you cut through the clutter. There is this tendency -- a very human tendency -- that the people on the extreme get heard the loudest. Situations where the world has been upended like this, it is easier to polarize from an extreme position. We love the idea that our show allows us to explore the idea of what humans do when given the opportunity to rule over other humans with the rules of society eliminated. This notion of our incredible propensity to subjugate each other is something we're interested in and becomes really dramatically important in Season 2.

Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.